1. Don’t be boring. Roger Ebert’s reviews are almost always entertaining to read, whether or not you have any interest in the movie being reviewed. He understood that a review isn’t just an analysis of someone else’s creation, it is a creation in and of itself. Just as film directors take pride in their creations, so should critics take pride in theirs.

2. Be personal. From the outset, one of the things that made Ebert unusual as a critic was how autobiographical his reviews were. Ebert knew that he wasn’t omniscient, and that each person’s perception of a film is inevitably colored by his or her own personality and history. Ebert knew that putting himself into his reviews didn’t just make them more interesting, it made them more honest.

3. A movie isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about it. This was one of Ebert’s favorite dictums. You’re not reviewing global warming when you review An Inconvenient Truth, any more than you’re reviewing war when you review Platoon. A movie—or a book, or a play—is a thing onto itself.

4. Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? Ebert called this “the Siskel Test,” in acknowledgement of the fact that the question was first asked by his longtime professional partner Gene Siskel. If filmmakers all asked themselves this question and answered it honestly, maybe half of all movies would never be made.

5. A critic is first and foremost a fan. People accuse critics of hating everything, but the fact of the matter is that you don’t take a job as a critic unless you deeply love the thing it is you’re writing about—in Ebert’s case, movies. Ebert wasn’t afraid to call a turkey a turkey, but through his film festival and through thousands upon thousands of words of writing, he advocated passionately for the great, for the good, and for movies in general.

6. Don’t allow yourself to be pigeonholed. Ebert wrote about politics, literature, and other subjects before he ever wrote about film, and he continued to occasionally weigh in on those subjects throughout his career. People who disagreed with him would tell him to “stick to movies,” but he always defended his right to speak his mind about anything, whether or not anyone wanted to listen. Very often, they did.

7. Art is art. A literary scholar who nearly went into academia instead of journalism, Ebert often mentioned books and other art forms in his movie reviews. No art work, and no medium, exists in a vacuum: there’s always cross-pollination, and Ebert appreciated that.

8. Embrace the clichés. When you see as many movies as Ebert did, you become acutely aware of crutches, clichés, and fallback strategies commonly used by filmmakers. Ebert had a sense of humor about this, and throughout his life curated a “movie dictionary” that cataloged clichés. My favorite Ebert observations include the Idiot Plot (the story that would immediately be resolved and come to a conclusion if all the characters weren’t complete idiots), the Fallacy of the Talking Killer (the killer who has his would-be victim where he wants him, but gloats until the victim thinks his way out or gets rescued by a buddy), and the Disappearing Dog (movie dogs show up whenever they’re needed to act cute, but unlike real dogs, never get curious and stroll in when there’s something interesting going on—like, say, a murder in the bathtub).

9. The best way to criticize a movie is to make a better movie. This was another Ebert maxim, based on the knowledge that if a critic pans a movie, it’s because he or she has seen enough good movies that he or she knows what amazing things you can do with two hours of screen time.

10. It’s all gratuitous. This was Ebert’s rebuff to protests about “gratuitous” sex or violence in the movies. A movie, Ebert noted, isn’t a house or a hamburger: it’s a work of art, and to criticize something you see in a movie as “gratuitous” suggests that everything else in the movies is somehow necessary. We don’t need movies to eat, sleep, or breathe—even though, as Ebert well knew, it sometimes feels that way. That’s the magic of the movies, and the genius of a man who loved them so well.

– Jay Gabler